Archives for March 2005

From the nervous nineties to the even more nervous post-9/11 noughties, we do indeed appear to live in anxious times. But neuroses have long been connected with urban space and living in the metropolis. And for Richard Williams, lecturer at the Department of History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, there is more to our anxieties than fear of crime or imminent terrorist attack. He is interested in the more fundamental anxiety about where society is headed, crystallised he argues in the uncertain status of the post-War city.

Certainly, despite excited talk of urban renaissance, the city has struggled to find itself of late, a problem perhaps best exemplified in the distinctly English new urbanism of the Prince of Wales’ recent pet project of Poundbury in Dorset – a biscuit tin village of an ‘urban’ development if ever there was one. To Williams’ credit, he is careful not to underestimate the pervasiveness of this profoundly conservative outlook. Despite the rantings of HRH on the subject of carbuncles and suchlike through the 1980s and beyond, it is the work of the supposedly arch-‘modernists’ Richard Rogers and Norman Foster that have brought a very English restraint to the very heart of the metropolis.

English architects have sought refuge in what Williams calls the ‘architecture of civility’, primarily in the forms of the public squares and street cafes familiar on the continent. For Richard Rogers, these are the places where ‘citizenship is enacted’ (and, he forgets to mention, enforced). The transformation of Trafalgar Square into the centerpiece of a newly urbane urbanism – with CCTV, wardens, and GLA-approved festivities included – is indicative.

The problem with public life is not so much that we lack public spaces anyway, but rather that as the political sphere has narrowed there is little intellectual room for manouvre. For this reason, the imperatives of mobility and civil renewal are not – as the prevailing view would have it – opposed.

Which is why Milton Keynes – infamous 1960s ‘new town’ – is the most striking of Williams’ case-studies. It towers above the rest despite its low-rise and fundamentally suburban credentials, because it is unashamedly urban in outlook. Milton Keynes was built for the car, for vast and sprawling living, and it continues to be the fastest growing urban area in the country. The reality might not match up to the original plans, but that isn’t the point. In the not so distant past, this could have been the future.

Instead we have restoration and memorialisation. Williams cites Liverpool’s Albert Docks as an example of our anxious fixation with the past, and what it represents, to the detriment of building something that might endure in the future. The ossified ruins of the city’s merchant past weren’t ruinous enough for some mawkishly nostalgic commentators. The only way that this particular instance of the urban could be made acceptable was by denying itself and inhabiting the debris of something less fleeting or insubstantial than today’s confused culture.

This romanticisation of glories associated with more robust times is less evident though in the other Docklands – or ‘America, E14’, as one critic dubbed it. And it has invited the venomous hostility of the English architectural establishment ever since. Canary Wharf’s association with the rhetoric of the free market individualism of the 1980s partly explains this. As does the anti-Americanism that Williams also identifies. And there is more to it than financial deregulation and the suspension of planning law. The shiny new development starkly represented the kind of brash ambition and Wild West optimism that is anathema to a profession intent on purging itself of such hubris.

But even beneath the Pelli tower – Canary Wharf’s seemingly ballsy icon that so upsets its reactionary critics – anxiety abounds. For Williams, Docklands’ ‘super-modernism’ is as disorienting as it is impressive, its towering buildings and wide open spaces only exaggerating its uninhabited ‘alien’ ambience. The area is hermetically sealed from the rest of the city a few stops down the DLR or Jubilee Line, its stifling surveillance infrastructure ostensibly a reaction to the IRA bomb in 1993. America, E14 may not be as inward looking as Poundbury, but if Williams is right only, the buildings have sharp edges. It represents a hollow urbanism that is just as intent on disciplining those that enter its enclosures.

Despite the visual transformation of our cityscapes, punctuated as they are by these ever-more spectacular buildings and developments, there remains an underlying continuity with the typically parochial architecture of the past. Williams is impressive on the way that architects have articulated a culture informed by fear. What he doesn’t do is ask why this is happening now and – just as important – why we are more receptive to it than ever before.

Whose Life Is It Anyway? rides the wave of the peculiar enthusiasm for the ‘right to die’. This used to be considered a rather eccentric and marginal cause for want of a better word – but a right? Claire fights to reassert control over her life, but to what end other than just that – the end? Kim Cattrall, of Sex and the City fame, plays Claire Harrison, a woman who, as the play opens, has spent the past few months hospitalised following a road accident that has severed her spinal cord.

One might accuse the production of cashing in on the box office appeal of its star, had the (male) critics not drooled over her evident ability to act ‘from the neck up’ and still exude sex appeal. There has been a mixed response to the play despite its winning the Society of West End Theatres’ Best Play Award when it was first performed in 1978. But Cattrall’s West End debut has wowed them nonetheless, with a performance that finds her ‘flat on her back’ once again. You get the idea.

But Michael Billington, writing in the Guardian, has described the play as loaded. She has ‘all the best lines’ he complains. But, along with Peter Heppel of The Stage, he likes the anti-patriarchal element. (After its initial run with Tom Conti, the play reopened on Broadway in 1979 with a female lead.) The fact that this heightens her perceived vulnerability is all to the good, the critics seem to concur, as she is seen to battle against the very male world of medicine.

She uses her womanly ways to flirt with the orderly (‘nice ass’) and the junior doctor (‘do you like my breasts?), and seduces the critics and the audience too. But, in the end, for all the witty asides and wicked humour, the writer, Brian Clark, doesn’t begin to make a convincing case for her wish to end her own life. As this is a topical production, he name-checks the usual suspects, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeve and Diane Pretty, and in so doing portrays Claire, like Pretty, as anti-heroine. She doesn’t yearn for the return of sensation or champion stem cell research as Reeve did, or hope to seek solace in the world of the mind like Hawking. Perhaps she can be forgiven for that. But instead she is tormented by the cutting short of her sensual self. That is what she mourns.

The other characters are little more than cardboard cut outs of tired clichés and caricatures made to elevate her victim-status – the patronising social worker, kindly yet buttoned-up matron, and the ‘doctor knows best’ Dr Emerson. William Chubb plays the consultant who holds to the unfashionable view that it his job to keep people alive. His junior, played by Alexander Siddiq, is patient’s advocate with a bedside-manner to match. Ann Mitchell as Sister Anderson is the kind of figure the ultra-modern NHS is welcoming back to put that pesky MRSA bug back in its place. Indeed, it is striking that not only the issue of euthanasia but also the rise of the ‘expert-patient’ make this play perhaps more resonant today than when it was first performed.

And yet I can’t help wondering why, for all its timeliness and the plaudits that Cattrall has rightly received, nobody has raised an eyebrow – with the exception of Billington – about its underlying message. It should go without saying that this is not life-affirming stuff. Even if art needn’t aspire to such a worthy cause, surely we expect each other to be made of tougher stuff, and should be interrogating the assumptions of those who claim to campaign on our behalf? The fact that this play hasn’t caused offence should be a worry for anybody who takes what, for once, deserves to be called a ‘life and death’ issue seriously. Why aren’t paraplegics jamming the switchboards or battering down the doors of the Comedy Theatre? It’s not such a silly question, you know.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.